Month: October 2010

One month ago I cut down my fresh coriander bush and hung it upside down in the carport. Now that it has dried for a period it’s easy to collect the seeds: First by picking groups of seeds off the stems: And finally by picking off each individual seed. This is the total amount of

Month: October 2010

The pictures are coming in from my webcam now and I’m using a program called motion. It’s capable of storing pictures when a movement is detected in front of the webcam, but I have disabled this feature and configured it to take a picture every 60 seconds instead. motion has a small internal web server

Month: October 2010

I had to shorten the USB cable to make my webcam work properly or I would get lots of errors when I tried to grab images. With a shorter cable I had to move the webcam closer to the window and place it on the roof instead: Here’s the webcam looking down on the garden.

Month: October 2010

This year I’m also saving seeds from tomatoes. The tomato harvest was not impressive this year, with a lot of green ones, and many bad ones due to blight. I managed to collect seeds from 11 different plants: All of the seeds have been scraped out: The seed and water mixture needs to ferment under

Month: October 2010

My NSLU2 garden webcam setup is working now with the original USB cable on the camera soldered together with an extra 3 m (10 ft) long USB extension cable. Now the link is stable and the data output is consistent: $ v4l-info ### video4linux device info [/dev/video0] ### general info VIDIOCGCAP name : “OV511 USB

Month: October 2010

I have collected the chicken coop blog post series in an ebook making it much easier to read. The ebook is called How I Built My Chicken Coop and you can download it for free from this link: How I Built My Chicken Coop (Download time is about 1 minute with a 5 Mbit/s Internet

Month: October 2010

In order to get pictures from my garden webcam onto my NSLU2 computer I installed a program called motion, which is supposed to be able grab pictures from the webcam. I tried several times to get a picture but I got lots of strange errors, so I installed the package v4l-conf to get access to

Month: October 2010

I have found a way to solve the webcam bandwidth problem on my NSLU2. The physical setup is like this: USB hub connected to the Disk 1 connector on the NSLU2 The flash memory disk connected to port 1 of the external USB hub. This leaves room for my 1-wire soil moisture sensor in port

Month: October 2010

I’m testing another way of joining my three USB cables together. The joint is going to be placed outside so it needs some kind of weather protection. I’m considering using ordinary Ethernet cable instead, but I’m not sure what that would do to the USB signal from the webcam to the NSLU2 computer. Using an